Leap Year - Review

The stars of romantic comedies used to be better than they are now at pretending that they don't like each other. In a movie like It Happened One Night (1934), Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert gave such good antagonism that you just knew they were meant to be together. The bickering wasn't petty; it was proof that they had the sparky toughness - the ego - for love. In Leap Year, Amy Adams plays Anna, a real estate exhibitor who chases her mealy cardiologist boyfriend (Adam Scott) all the way to Ireland to propose to him on leap-year day (an old Irish custom). Matthew Goode is Declan, the tall, faraway-eyed scruffy-dreamboat Irish bartender who, for 500 euros, agrees to shepherd Anna to Dublin. The two spend the movie roving through the countryside, from pubs to inns to old castles to crashed weddings, working their way through various levels of annoyance, class warfare, and petulant erotic tension.